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2008: Public High School Teacher of the Year

Back To School for Di Benedetto
Teacher passes on a love of literature to students at his former high school

Charles Di Benedetto spent his high school career under the hood of a car. Enrolled in the auto mechanic program at Thomas Edison High School, Di Benedetto was planning on following in his grandfather and father’s footsteps. By his senior year, however, he lost interest in the trade, turning his focus to literature—“something more enticing,” Di Benedetto said. He realized that going to Queens College to study literature would be more lucrative, both professionally and personally.

For the past seven years, Di Benedetto, 28, stayed in his native Queens to teach English at Far Rockaway High School. During his tenure, he has been able to teach alongside those who had mentored him as a high school student through a teacher’s union program. Working with former teachers, he said, took time to get used to.

“It felt a little weird. I didn’t know how to address them,” Di Benedetto said. “I called them by their last names.”

As a young educator, Di Benedetto exercises new teaching methods and material to get his students to understand and relate to literary classics. In tackling tough pieces like Hamlet, he places students at different reading levels in teams to let them develop their own analyses.

“They can decipher many of Hamlet’s soliloquies and bring a new interpretation to something that has been interpreted 50 million times already,” he said.

An important part of Di Benedetto’s teaching style is picking works that interest him, which worked well when he introduced his students to Oedipus.

“If you don’t like it, what makes you think another kid will?” he said.

Once his students are hooked on literary staples like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Antigone, Di Benedetto introduces contemporary authors like Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam War veteran whose fiction was influenced by wartime experiences. By studying books outside of classical literature, he hopes his students can draw parallels to complex works written centuries ago.

“I try to find a theme that connects the stories,” he said. “The principles are still the same, but presented in a new way.”

Striving to engage his students in the classroom, Di Benedetto pushes teens to think beyond their senior year. He has an impressive track record of helping needy students not only get into college but to stay there with the help of scholarships and housing. Far Rockaway High School has even had students accepted to Harvard—no small feat for a school that does not have the best rapport with the Ivy League, Di Benedetto noted.

His proudest achievement this year is the early graduation of a junior he taught in 9th grade. Initially, the student did not write very well and needed to improve her focus. Over the next three years, her writing improved so much that she has been accepted to the CUNY Honors program with several scholarships.
“Many of our kids now,” he said, “have a different outlook on what college can be.”

— Dan Rivoli